I’d argue if you can wipe it (which requires your iCloud account approval), install it as someone else, login with that new iCloud account, then reset it and it suddenly reverts back to the previous owner, something is wrong or very unintuitive.
The problem on Mac it seems is that there are two official ways to do it. One proper way (the “Erase All Content and Settings”) and one other way (the way we did it, boot into recovery and format it, then go through setup with another iCloud account which apparently just temporarily lets another user use the machine). On iPhone there is no user accessible recovery mode so that can’t happen there.
If you go through recovery, you can delete the content, but when you go to reinstall, you will be prompted for the credentials for the user tied to it.
Meaning, you can delete, but you can't reinstall without being prompted for authorization by the account that currently 'owns' that computer.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208987
"Other ways to disable Activation Lock"
"Activation Lock is disabled when you use the Erase All Content and Settings feature."
Apple confirms that the feature works exactly as I said and exactly as users expect. I've used it myself, and it does work.
Users running software that is several major versions out of date will have a more difficult experience, since that button did not exist, and they would have to first remove Activation Lock before going into Recovery Mode to manually format the Mac. Those are the remaining steps that were linked several comments up from here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34505523
Apple has made the process as easy as it possible can be now, identical to the process used to factory reset an iPhone.